Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [349]
The French wounded are almost all quartered in the city hospitals, or in those houses whose owners may have shown a lukewarmness in the present contest. Their constant cry was, and still is, ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Some of them brought in from the field the other day, extremely weak from loss of blood and want of food . . . vented the same exclamation. Louis XVIII sent an officer the other day to inquire if they were in want of anything and to afford assistance to those who required it. He visited every one of the hospitals, but I believe he could not prevail on one to accept assistance from him in the name of his sovereign. They had no king but one.43
At the very least, then, Napoleon was in a position to put up a fight. With relatively few allied troops ready to take the field, the emperor could now either wait for the massive invasion that the Seventh Coalition was certain to mount as soon as it had brought up sufficient men, or take the offensive and secure a dramatic victory that might win time for his regime to consolidate its hold on France or even shatter his enemies’ resolve. Faced by this choice, the emperor did not hesitate. Nor did it take much time to work out that the obvious targets at which to strike were the Anglo-Dutch-German army of the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army of Field Marshal Blücher, both of which were cantoned in southern Belgium. The temptation was all the greater as relations between the two leaders were poor. There had been bitter quarrels as to who should take command of the various German contingents that had been sent to Belgium and the quality of neither force was especially good. Even Wellington’s British troops were largely composed of raw recruits: ‘The British army in Belgium is not numerous . . . A considerable proportion of the army . . . consists of young men who have seen no service whatever.’44 As for Wellington’s Dutch, Belgians and Germans, they were for the most part not only just as inexperienced but also singularly unenthusiastic. According to the rifle officer John Kincaid, ‘Our foreign auxiliaries, who constituted more than half of our numerical strength, with some exceptions were little better than a raw militia - a body without a soul.’45 And, finally, Blücher was having to contend with wholesale disaffection in the many Saxon regiments that had been forcibly incorporated into the Prussian ranks. Among the visitors to his headquarters was a British officer who brought him some dispatches from Wellington: ‘It was at the time when the Saxon troops had mutinied because Blücher wished to incorporate them in the divisions of the Prussian army in place of leaving them to act in a body as he had no great opinion of them. This they resented, [and so they] mutinied and compelled Blücher to leave Liège and retire to the village where I found him . . . Blücher disarmed the mutinous Saxons and sent them to the rear.’46
To return to the emperor, by early June Napoleon was concentrating as many troops as he dared on the Belgian frontier, his plan being to get between Wellington and Blücher, force them apart, and then defeat them in detail. However, the first shots of the War of the Seventh Coalition were not those fired by his troops as they streamed across the Belgian frontier south of Charleroi on 15 June, as fighting had already erupted in Italy. Here Murat had felt increasingly under siege, the government of Ferdinand IV having spent the months that had passed since the abdication of Napoleon doing all that it could to harass him. Irregular bands were sent over from Sicily to form the nucleus of a fresh